


The Corset

by Mime_Paradox



Category: Chasing Life (TV)
Genre: Corset Lacing, Corsetry, F/F, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-23 19:11:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9672281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mime_Paradox/pseuds/Mime_Paradox
Summary: If Beth had known wearing a corset was all it would take for Natalie to open up, she wouldn't have waited until she had to wear one for work.





	

As she placed the corset around her torso and felt the material press against her camisole and the flesh beneath, reaching from just below her breasts all the way to her upper hips, Beth reminded herself that she needed the money. 

It wasn’t that her job was terrible—she’d had worse. And the more time she spent at it, the more certain she felt that fashion design was her future, at least in the medium term. And the pay _was_ good, comparatively.  She just wished she were doing it all under someone other than Jaclyn. Whimsical in the worst sense, her boss demanded a lot and she demanded unpredictably, so when her inscrutable muse had told her that what the sartorial world truly needed was a return to the 1880’s, she’d made her entire staff (and, to be fair, herself) wear corsets for the week—for the inspiration, she claimed.  She’d gone all out, too, buying them herself with her own money, at more than a hundred dollars apiece. And now Beth had to truss herself like a turkey and spend the day trying to act normal and not faint.

Well, at least the corset itself was gorgeous: black had always looked great on her, the embroidery was almost too pretty to cover up, and the material, while largely mesh, felt satisfyingly weighty, like a really comfortable pair of boots for the upper body. It wasn’t something she’d ever wear unless she was literally being paid to, but like the job, it wasn’t terrible.

Of course, the hard part was still to come. The packaging for the corset had come with instructions on how to properly tighten the garment, instructions which at first glance had seemed complex, but perfectly doable. Five minutes later, she wondered what she would give up to have maids like in the movies—or at least a third arm.  

“Everything okay, Beth?” Natalie asked, as she stormed into the unlocked room. “I heard swearing…what are you doing?”

She shouldn’t have felt embarrassed. Beth wasn’t sure _why_ she felt embarrassed. In the few months since Natalie had become her roommate, April’s sister had seen her in all sorts of states, and in at least one compromising position with Graham. And yet it was only just now, dressed in an unbuttoned calf-length skirt, knee-high boots and three different layers above the waist that she was feeling sheepish. She hoped it didn’t show.  “Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, trying to sound as this had always been the plan. “I need your help with this.”

A few explanations and false starts later, Natalie had positioned herself behind Beth and was pulling on the corset laces, causing the garment to close in around the latter’s waist. While not nearly as torturous as people made it sound, the sensation wasn’t entirely comfortable either, feeling a lot like butterflies, which Beth was doing her best to ignore.

“You know, I had a friend in high school who wanted one of these bad” Natalie said idly. “I didn’t get it—it always seemed more trouble than it was worth. Like, guys aren’t that complicated. You don’t need to wear the Ikea of clothes.”

“Maybe it wasn’t because of a guy,” Beth said, as she tried to modulate her breathing. “Maybe it was for herself, or for a girl.”

“You didn’t know this girl.  Trust me, it was a guy. Anyway, what I meant to say is, I think I’m starting to get it.”

Beth felt herself growing warm. Was that…? Had she…? No, probably not. That had just been a casual compliment, nothing more. Natalie had made loads of those, since they’d met. Heck, she herself made loads of those about how hot April’s sister was, and they didn’t mean anything, most of the time, other than a simple statement of fact. Maybe the corset was making her more oxygen-deprived than she’d thought. Beth didn’t feel particularly lightheaded or breathless, but what did she know?

( _I do look good, though_ , she thought. Even only partially tightened, the corset was doing magnificent things for her. Once Natalie was done, she was going straight for the mirror to see how it all looked.)

Beth wasn’t sure when she’d first started feeling that way for Natalie—yearning. She’d known she’d liked her from minute one, when she’d instantly shown that they were both on the same wavelength—the Thelma to her Louise in ways even April wasn’t—and that she was someone she’d like to befriend even if she weren’t a Carver by blood…but that had been different. She did, however, know precisely when she managed to identify her feelings for what they were.  It had been not long after April had begun her second stint in chemo, when Beth had been especially despondent and Natalie had been out, spending the night with Dominic. She hadn’t quite realized why she resented her roommate for doing something she had every right to do, until suddenly she did. 

 “So did you hear?” Beth asked, attempting to distract herself from a situation that had somehow gotten far too intimate. “Bren’s dating that Margo girl, from her old school.”

“I know! God, I wish I’d had her guts, at that age.”

“Oh, like you weren’t sneaking off to do unspeakable things when you were seventeen.”

“Totally,” Natalie responded, sounding damn proud of it. “Not with girls, though. I wasn’t _that_ brave.”

 So Beth hadn’t been imagining things. And she knew exactly what Natalie was talking about. “Yeah, it’s…you know exactly what you’re getting with guys. And there’s like a million of them, so you can screw up totally and it’s no big deal. By the way, you’re keeping both sides of the corset parallel, right? The instructions said you needed to do that.”

“Relax, they’re parallel. You just focus on when you want me to stop. Don’t want to cut you in half here.”

“Not yet, but I’ll tell you. Please don’t cut me in half.” Even though she was starting to feel like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed, Beth found she didn’t want Natalie to stop. She’d somehow gotten the younger woman to open up about something new, and did not wish to break the spell. Trying to sound casual, she asked: “So were there any specific girls, or are you just being general?”

“More specific than general. There was this girl, Margarita—she was Puerto Rican—who I was friends with back in high school. One year, it turns out that she’d gained a lot of weight over the summer, and she was all self-conscious about it. And I get it, you know, I personally thought she looked hot. Like, sex dreams hot. Like, she hadn’t done anything for me before, but then, BAM!—oh, sorry.” Natalie gesticulations had caused her to pull on the corset laces a bit too enthusiastically, and Beth had immediately felt it. “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine.” Beth said, as she worked to recover her breath. “Just…don’t do that again, alright? So what happened with Margarita?”

“So we were at this party, getting drunk, as you do, and then out of the blue she kisses me.”

“Oh, cool!”

“Not cool. Like I said, I wasn’t that brave back then.”

Beth turned around so quickly she snapped the corset laces from Natalie’s hands. “You didn’t,” she asked, horrified.

“I did,” Natalie said, her face no longer in its usual state of self-satisfaction. “I like to think I wasn’t terrible—like, I didn’t call her a freak or anything—but I left her crying, so I probably was.”

This was a terrible story. “What happened to her?”

“Well, I apologized the next day, and we were still in the same circles, so we still talked, but after that we were never really friends anymore.  She’s doing well, though, I think. Last I heard, she’d started law school, which is more than I’ve ever done.”

“Oh! That’s a bummer about the party, though—mostly for her, but for you, too.” She turned around again in order to let Natalie resume lacing. “So, what do you think would have happened, if you know, you done differently?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we’d have dated or anything like that, but I don’t know. It might have been good.” 

Natalie had gone sad, and Beth thought she understood why. It had been hard not to notice, during the time they’d known each other, how April’s sister had a complex about being people’s second choice, and never the one people really wanted—she’d broken up with Dominic over it recently—so it had to have hurt to realize that she’d screwed things up with the one who _had_ chosen her first.  Beth’s thoughts, however, were interrupted by her body, which had finally decided that it had reached its limits, and so she told Natalie to stop and tie up the corset. 

“So how does it feel?” Natalie asked, her work done. “Because it _looks_ incredible, and it’s not even tight all the way.”

“It feels…good!” More butterflies. There was something about the way it was affecting her everything, from the way she stood and presented herself to the way she walked, which she was finding very appealing.  She moved towards the living room, where the apartment’s best mirror was located. “Oh, wow, you’re right.” While Beth was normally quite secure in her utter hotness, she couldn't help but feel impressed with the way the corset had made a significant portion of her waist disappear, and reshaped her in a way that made her hips look enticingly massive. “It’s like being a Kardashian, almost.”

“Oh, please.” Natalie scoffed. “None of them has anything on you.” 

Beth returned to her room and put on an aquamarine button-down shirt, one which usually left an inch or so of her midriff uncovered, and which now exposed an inch or so of corset. Beth decided it didn’t matter: the winter weather meant there were still other layers to put on, and the only place where she’d remove those would be at work, where everyone knew what was up. As she buttoned the shirt up, she took pleasure at her new cleavage; while she owned several bras with seeming magical powers to create something out of nothing, this was something else entirely, and the corset wasn’t even touching her girls.

“Okay, so yeah, you’re hot, we get it,” Natalie interrupted as she followed Beth into the bedroom. “I helped you out, so you owe me. I want to know now, what was your ‘not brave’ moment?”

“Oh, that,” Yeah, it would have been unfair not to share. “It’s nothing really special—there was just this bestie back in high school in Australia, and I had this huge crush on her, and I never told her. Her name was Angie.”

“Angie,” Natalie repeated. “So why didn’t you tell her?”

“I was just afraid. Afraid she’d reject me. Afraid she wouldn’t. It was just simpler not to do anything about it, back then. And I mean, it’s not like I had awful parents or asshole classmates or anything, but still: if I liked guys and could be with them, why rock the boat? Maybe I’d have taken the leap, if I’d only been into girls. Or maybe not. I have no idea how Greer did it.”  

“And did you ever figure it out?”

“Kind of. Not really,” Beth admitted.  “Like, I’ve kissed women, at parties and the like. I’m definitively into them, if they’re hot enough. But I’ve never really gone to one I’ve liked and gone ‘hey, I like you, we should date’. That’s always been harder.”

“Tell me about it,” Natalie said, her tone and the fact that she left indicating that she had said all she wanted to say on the subject. Again alone, Beth returned to her room and continued adding layers to her outfit—first a sweater, and then her winter coat, scarf, and hat—and then she was ready to go. 

Superficially, it turned out to be a day like any other. Beth first stopped by the Carver house, now a constant whirlwind of activity in preparation for April’s wedding, for surrogate family time and what turned out to be a smaller than usual breakfast. The corset did not go unnoticed there, and everyone had something to say: April and Sara were both supportive, but not without concerns; Brenna was fascinated, which led Sara to expressly forbid her from buying one while still living under her roof; Emma talked about how it reminded her of the girdles she hated to wear way back then; Leo, who had also stopped by for breakfast, noted that if he were not about to get married to the most perfect woman in the world, he’d say that it was super-hot, but since he was, he wouldn’t. This in turn threatened to turn into a conversation between him and April about sexy-wear, but everyone else, seeing which way the winds were blowing, quickly moved to shut it down.  Later, on the way to work, Beth tried to determine if she was just imagining that she was drawing more attention than usual from other train passengers, or if she actually was.  It seemed weird that she would—corset aside, she didn’t look any different, and there seemed to be no way for people to notice it under all the other layers—but at the same time, the idea that people may be drawn to her for no reason that they could understand felt rather thrilling—like all the fun parts of having a secret. As long as no jerk tried to harass or cat-call her, well, then, she was more than happy with the extra eyeballs.

If asked, though, Beth would have to admit that her thoughts were partly an attempt to not think about Natalie, and from analyzing their earlier conversations until it became reduced to atoms under her mental glare. Not that it worked. For a moment, she considered texting April so that she could vent and process, but decided better of it; maybe if it were about any other girl, but not her bestie’s half-sister. Fortunately for her ability to function, the commute eventually and mercifully came to an end, having taken a surprisingly short time, and yet, still far too long.   

Work, despite a brand new thing for everyone to talk and / or complain about, was work. Like her, everyone in the studio was decked out in a corset—including, fascinatingly, the men—and it was interesting to see all the different ways they’d chosen to wear it. Some, like Beth, concealed most or all of it under clothes and remained ambivalent about their current marching orders. Others had more enthusiastically turned their corsets into part of their ensembles in ways that reminded Beth that she worked with some fashionable as fuck people, none of whom were the boss. None, though, was happier than Jules, a college friend of Jaclyn who had just recently begun her transition and had been vocal about both her desire for a corset and her inability to afford one; while she wasn’t showing off her new figure like some others, it was she who’d looked most different. Jaclyn, for her part, had worn a model that according to her—and Beth had no reason to doubt her—made her waist span only twenty inches when fully closed, as it was. It certainly looked impressive—the jury was still out on “good”—but it was clear that she wasn’t entirely comfortable in it, which made Beth feel an uncomfortable combination of schadenfreude and sympathy, and so she was silently happy when, after lunch, Jacklyn called her to her office to help her loosen the garment a few inches. 

Natalie, somewhat surprisingly, was still home when Beth arrived, and talking to her mom about some book she was apparently reading; Beth gave her a careless greeting and made a beeline to her room to remove the corset. No matter how pleasant it may have been earlier, after almost twelve hours in it, all the garment was inspiring were ways to kill her boss without getting convicted for it. She had removed her outer layers and had been just about to undo the bow on the stays when her roommate joined her inside the room, looking weirdly resolute.

“Hey,” Beth asked, abandoning, for the moment, her fumbling with the laces. “Don’t you have a shift starting soon?”

“It’s covered.  Patrick asked me to switch with him tomorrow, so he’s doing my shift today.”

“Oh, cool. Do you want to hang, then? Watch a movie, or maybe go dancing, later?”

“Later, sure. I wanted to talk to you first, though.”

“Sure. What about?” Something serious, from the looks of it.

“So I told you about Margarita this morning, and how I wasn’t brave enough to make anything happen with her, even though we both sort of wanted it to.” There was a practiced, not entirely natural quality to her words, as if she’d been rehearsing them. “It used to bother me, until it didn’t. It’s like you said: guys were available, so I didn’t have to wonder what would happen if I ever felt about another girl the way I did about her. I realized something today, though: It’s bothering me again.”

Beth said nothing. In an instant, she’d calculated a million ways to parse that sentence, and staggering range of possibilities proved immediately more torturous than any corset could ever be. “What do you mean?” she finally stammered.

“I mean…oh, fuck it.” And with that, Natalie quickly bridged the gap between them, entered Beth’s personal space, grabbed her face with both hands and pulled her in for a kiss. 

Some time ago, Beth and Brenna had concluded that Natalie was a cactus—forced by her environment into guarding herself and being defensive, but underneath it all was a great person. “Prickly” had been the agreed-upon word. Right now, however, there was no prickliness to her, but determined and complete openness, and Beth felt herself responding in kind. Grabbing Natalie by her waist—soft, Beth was surprised to feel, but why shouldn’t it feel that way?—and drew her in closer to better savor her. 

No simple kiss felt like this. Whether because of the Natalie of it all or because of the corset still pressing against her, Beth felt aware of her body in a way that felt both new and transcendental. As Natalie’s lips pressed against her over and over again, she could feel every bead of sweat, every rise and fall of her chest, and the flow of her blood, rearranging itself in response to the new circumstances. For the first time, she realized how sex could be considered sinful; no human being was ever supposed to feel this way. It felt like cheating.  

Eventually, though, it became—very unfairly—time to come up for air, and Beth, flushed and breathless, found herself forced to disengage. Natalie’s face, she noticed, mirrored her own. _More_ , it demanded.

“How long?” was all Beth managed to ask. She was having trouble connecting thoughts and turning them into words. Part of her wanted to process this and make sure they were both on the same page, but that faction was currently fighting a losing battle against the one which considered talking a waste of precious oxygen that could be better spent elsewhere.

“This morning,” said Natalie, looking the most relieved it was possible for a human to be. “That’s when I knew for sure. You?”

“A few weeks. Wasn’t sure I should say anything, you being April’s sister and my roommate and all.”

“Weeks?” Natalie repeated, a hint of her usual defensiveness back up again, tinged with something else. “You’re not just saying that?” Hope—that’s what it was. The feeling you get when, despite everything, you still want to bet that things will be different this time.

How could someone like her ever feel that way? However it had happened, it was time to make it stop: Natalie had made her move and made herself vulnerable, and now it was her turn. Beth grabbed Natalie’s hands, intertwining her fingers with her own. “Listen: I care about you, a lot. Not just because you’re April’s sister. I think you’re smart and funny and hot and fantastic, and I was so jealous of Dominic while you two were dating. He’s an idiot for letting you go, by the way.” It was what Natalie would have liked to hear, Beth knew. It was also true.

She kissed Natalie, hoping to make all her affection for the other woman— _I choose_ you _, Natalie Ortiz_ —as palpable as possible. Natalie, to Beth’s infinite relief, responded in kind.  “So yeah, I want this,” Beth said. “So how about we move to my bed, and we can sort the details out later? Please?”

The two women continued, this time more deliberately, and with a definitive, if improvisational, sense of direction. After a few minutes, Natalie removed her t-shirt, revealing her own miracle cleavage-creating bra; not that she needed it, but Beth was glad for the access anyway. Beth unbuttoned her skirt and Natalie hiked it down and off. Her boots remained in place, as Beth did not currently have the flexibility required to remove them, and Natalie, too busy elsewhere, did not volunteer to help. They arrived at the bed and knelt down on it. Beth had moved on to Natalie’s neck: if she was anything like her, it’d be an especially sensitive area. She was, and it was.

The sensation from before had returned, increased tenfold. While the corset still around her robbed her of both flexibility and air and encased far too much of her in steel, it somehow amplified everything else. As she focused on leading Natalie— _here_ , not there—and let herself be led in turn, she somehow managed to remain aware of the ecstatic electricity enveloping her entire body. As it built upon itself, Beth concluded that this could not—oh, that felt wonderful—be a one-time thing. This needed to happen again, consistently and frequently, and for a second, she feared Natalie would not feel the same way, before the thought dissipated, as easily as it had come. Even if that were the case—and Natalie’s words were not the ones of someone looking for a one-night thing—the gamble had been entirely worth it. She did wonder, however, how they were ever going to tell April about this.  

But that was tomorrow—right now, her focus needed to be elsewhere. Natalie’s hands had made their way to the corset laces, trying to find the bow that held everything together. As breathless as she felt, and as much as she yearned for release, that wouldn’t do at all. “No,” she said, as she took Natalie’s hands, leading them lower, until she pressed them against her own bum. “Leave it on.”

 


End file.
